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AWS Setup Overview

Workbench runs on your own AWS account. Setting it up is mostly a one-time administrator task; individual users do almost nothing.

Need AWS help?

The SuperCowPowers team is happy to help set up AWS and Workbench for free — workbench@supercowpowers.com or on Discord.

Who does what

Administrators — done once per AWS account: create the account/users, deploy the Workbench stacks, and grant role access. Follow the Administrator Setup pages in order.

Users — done by each person: configure an AWS CLI/SSO profile (AWS CLI/SSO Setup), then pip install 'workbench[all]' and use the API. That's it — users never deploy stacks.

Administrator setup flow

Do these in order (the optional stacks can be skipped or added later):

  1. AWS Account & Users — create the account, SSO users, and groups
  2. Core Stack — deploy the foundational Workbench-ExecutionRole (required)
  3. Grant role access — SSO Users or IAM Users
  4. (optional) Compute Stack — AWS Batch for pipeline fan-out
  5. (optional) Dashboard Stack — the team web UI (+ optional domain/SSL)
  6. Verify — build a full ML pipeline end-to-end as a smoke test

See The Workbench Stacks for what each stack provisions and when you need it.

Useful AWS references